by Tara Joyce | May 4, 2017 | Cultural Creativity, Featured, Self/Business Growth
Every relationship you develop, from the most casual to the most intimate, serves to help you become more conscious.
We are taught to honour others, yet often this is one of the most difficult acts we can perform. For not only does it require us, first and foremost, to honour ourselves, it also requires us to come to know our Self. In a larger sense, your relationships are spiritual messengers, they bring into your life revelations about your own strengths and weaknesses.
Some of your relationships may be particularly painful (and necessarily so) as they’re here to help you to learn about yourself and your limitations. You may not be so enthusiastic to explore these “less attractive” aspects of self, yet recognizing your power to make choices and how they affect your world is the power of relationships. Your painful relationships help you to understand that every choice you make contributes to what you create. Choice is the process of creation itself.
Every choice you make is a creative act of spiritual power for which you are held responsible. Managing this power of choice, with all its spiritual and creative implications, is the essence of human experience. Yet you can’t know the full outcome of any choice you make, and so you may find yourself trying to control your life, and the life of others. Disappointment inevitably ensues since, try as you might, the physical world (and the people you are in relationship with) cannot be controlled. Your desires and whims are not for life to serve you on a silver platter.
Which returns you to the place where the greatest power you have is how you choose to behave in your relationships. Your relationships (especially the painful ones) help you to master your inner responses to the external world. They teach that you get to choose your thoughts and emotions.
The power and challenge of your relationships is to learn what motivates you to make the choices you do. In learning about what motivates you, you learn about the essence of your Self. Sex, power, and money are the currencies of relationships and your fear and/or faith is the energy you put behind this currency. This dynamic of choice, of fear and faith, guarantees you cannot run away from yourself or your decisions. For every outcome in some extent reflects this faith and/or fear.
To discover your personal motivations and your “false gods,” how you use and misuse the currencies of the physical world, you need relationships. So much of the way you respond to external challenges is how you respond to yourself. To guide you in developing a healthy and loving relationship with yourself, you have your relationships as a mirror. They are awakening you to your true personal power.
photo credit: Toa Heftiba
by Tara Joyce | Apr 27, 2017 | Innerpreneurship
What distracts you from your goals? What leaves you questioning the path you are currently on?
All around you are distractions and noise. People, places, and things clamouring for your attention, for your time, and for your energy. Some may have your interests at heart, while most have their own interests in mind. Sometimes, your interests may align but this can only be possible when you know what you need and want, outside of the noise.
The noise can be overwhelming and supremely distracting. I dare say that most of us spend our lives caught up in it, swimming in it, pursuing agendas and avenues that ultimately don’t serve us. We listen to what is loudest, most authoritative, most shiny—giving our personal power away, unaware of how much we’re giving up and how distracted from our self we’ve become. Until some thing, some one, some place begins to awaken us.
The very things that distract and block you from your path, powerfully, are the very things to support you in focusing on it. They remind you of what truly matters to you, by asking you, pushing you, persuading you to focus elsewhere. They test you and teach you about the other options for your life, and allow you to feel into these choices to determine what truly feels right for you.
The noise can be your guide; not towards what it is demanding from you, but towards what you need for yourself, what truly matters to you as an individual. Your distractions can help you to focus, and your blocks can be your support. It’s your choice how they influence the life you’re building.
photo credit: Peter Hershey
by Tara Joyce | Mar 31, 2017 | Featured, Self/Business Growth
Do you know the Greek myth of Icarus? Icarus is the son of Daedalus who dared to fly too near the sun on wings of feathers and wax. His father cautioned him that flying too near the Sun would cause the wax to melt. But Icarus became enthralled with his ability to fly and forgot his father’s warning. The feathers came loose and Icarus plunged to his death in the sea.
As I see it, this myth is a lesson about balance, about finding balance with your ego and with your gifts. It was Icarus’ choice not accept his gift as it was and to see it as enough. Instead, he chose to push it further, to a place where his gift was destroyed, and he destroyed himself in the process.
We all have, and are given, wings to fly on and it is our choice what we do with them. Do we not use them and never take flight? Do we accept them as they are and fly proudly on them to new destinations? Or do we misuse them, flying too high, too close to the Sun, destroying our gift and ourselves in the process?
If you don’t fly—or you try to fly too high like Icarus, the myth teaches you’ll find yourself falling into the depths of emotional despair, drowning in your egoic feelings (as represented by the sea Icarus drowned in).
To make the most of your gifts, you don’t need to make yourself into more than you are, you don’t need to fly higher than you can and burn yourself, but you also don’t need to stay down on earth, denying your own wings to fly. You are enough. Icarus teaches you have power over what you do with your gifts, and to what heights and destinations they take you.
photo credit: Benjamin Carnevale
by Tara Joyce | Mar 17, 2017 | Innerpreneurship
Every craft-person has a toolbox of tools and techniques they use to bring their work to life. You too have a toolbox full of the tools and techniques you’ve picked up over your lifetime that have helped you to shape your life into what it is today.
Your tools are very personal, as are how you use them. You can hear people talk about employing techniques and tools generally, but only you can determine how they will work best with your creations.
Like artists, you must discover the truth of your own vision, and take action through this, using the unique tools you have available.
photo credit: Jeffrey Pot
by Tara Joyce | Mar 10, 2017 | Cultural Creativity
We need to resolve our past, so we can expose our truth and move forward with our lives. We are drowning in our unresolved emotions. Unrecognized, they weigh us down. Depressed by them, we unknowingly hide and mask them.
So often we think our uncomfortable emotions away, doing everything we can not to feel the truth of them. Our rationalizations become what is real to us, and what we feel. What is not comfortable we do not acknowledge.
Disconnected from the truth of our emotions, we become unaware of what we truly value and love, and we find ourselves investing in things that are not right for us. Not acknowledging what we feel, we look to others to validate how we ‘should’ feel, using them to rationalize what we want to feel into ‘reality’.
We need to resolve our past and what is uncomfortable to us, so we can fully live our lives. To do this, we need to be vulnerable with ourselves and with others. This begins with accepting our fear of vulnerability, of intimacy, of our defenses being breached. It’s okay it feels more safe to feel in control and to remain hidden, it’s okay to believe then scary things won’t happen that we can’t handle.
While it is nice to feel we can make predictable our feelings and their magnitude, we simply cannot. At some point, we must surrender to our lack of control. We must hand over the tightly held and relinquish the guarded. Despite what we fear, our hearts will not break, we will not be in mortal danger. We can peer deeply in. We can feel our hurt and survive. We don’t need to protect ourselves from the truth of our feelings. What we need is to drop the mask and to reclaim our vulnerability.
When we don’t explore the emotions we find so uncomfortable, we create conditions that support others in avoiding theirs. Yet when we face our past and our truth, we make it easier for others to the same. There are always reasons why not to feel something, why not to be something, why not to do something. In helping our self take the risk of vulnerability, we release our self from our past and allow our self to move forward with our life. Being what we truly are, we support others in being the same.
